The (un)Doing of a Book
Is an endurance performance project that battles an art book, a coffee sized photobook where history and propaganda merge at the point of becoming one. The source “30 Years” is a governmental book that narrates what has occurred in Iran since the revolution. Consisting of 1390 pages, the book collects the works of photojournalists, and pairs them with distinctly political captions (notably in English and Farsi). The result is a authoritative history of a country’s social, political, and cultural life. In this performance, I physically challenge this book and hence the constructed portrait of my history. The project consists of three main parts. First, all the photographs have been taken out of the book and they have been weaved together to create a carpet of sorts with distinct Islamic geometric designs. With this each page has become an empty white frame with the short caption. The artist then intervenes with the book for another round, where she takes each piece in an endurance performance and places the hundreds of pages, one next to form a giant wall piece, a memorial of the history lost in the missing images. The performance is accompanied with a three hour collection of youtube music videos made for the iconic songs of the traumatic moments of this history (the revolution, the Iran/Iraq war, reformism, and Green revolution). This performance is met with its mirror. Where in the same format, the artist takes the empties out pages and places them back in order and recreate the book. The same collection of video will accompany the reverse endurance performance.